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Akira Kurosawa

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                   Akira Kurosawa
   Akira Kurosawa on the set of Kagemusha (1980).
   Born 23 March 1910
        Ota, Tokyo, Japan
   Died 6 September 1998
        Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan

   Akira Kurosawa ( Kyūjitai: 黒澤 明, Shinjitai: 黒沢 明, Kurosawa Akira^ ?, 23
   March 1910— 6 September 1998) was a prominent Japanese film director,
   film producer, and screenwriter.

   His first credited film ( Sugata Sanshiro) was released in 1943; his
   last ( Madadayo) in 1993. His many awards include the Legion d'Honneur
   and an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.

Early Life

   Akira Kurosawa was born to Isamu and Shima Kurosawa on March 23, 1910.
   He was the youngest of eight children born to the Kurosawas in a suburb
   of Tokyo. Shima Kurosawa was forty years old at the time of Akira's
   birth and his father Isamu was forty-five. Akira Kurosawa grew up in a
   household with one older brother and three older sisters. Of his three
   older brothers, one died before Akira was born and one was already
   grown and out of the household. One of his four older sisters had also
   left the home to begin her own family before Kurosawa was born.

   Kurosawa's father worked as the director of a junior high school
   operated by the Japanese military and the Kurosawas descended from a
   line of former Samurai. Financially, the family was above average.
   Isamu Kurosawa embraced western culture both in the athletic programs
   that he directed and by taking the family to see films, which were then
   just beginning to appear in Japanese theaters. Later when Japanese
   culture turned away from western films, Isamu Kurosawa continued to
   believe that films were a positive educational experience.

   In primary school Akira Kurosawa was encouraged to draw by a teacher
   who took an interest in mentoring his talents. His older brother,
   Heigo, had a profound impact on him. Heigo was very intelligent and won
   several academic competitions, but also had what was later called a
   cynical or dark side. In 1923, the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed
   Tokyo and left 100,000 people dead. In the wake of this event, Heigo,
   17, and Akira, 13, made a walking tour of the devastation. Corpses of
   humans and animals were piled everywhere. When Akira would attempt to
   turn his head away, Heigo urged him not to. According to Akira, this
   experience would later instruct him that to look at a frightening thing
   head-on is to defeat its ability to cause fear.

   Heigo eventually began a career as a benshi in Tokyo film theaters.
   Benshi narrated silent films for the audience and were a uniquely
   Japanese addition to the theatre experience. However with the impact of
   talking pictures on the rise, benshi were losing work all over Japan.
   Heigo organized a benshi strike that failed. Akira was likewise
   involved in labor-management struggles, writing several articles for a
   radical newspaper while improving and expanding his skills as a painter
   and reading literature. Akira never considered himself a Communist
   despite his activities that he later would describe as reckless.

   When Akira Kurosawa was in his early 20s, his older brother Heigo
   committed suicide. Four months later, the oldest of Kurosawa's brothers
   also died, leaving Akira as the only surviving son of an original four
   at age 23. Kurosawa's next-oldest sibling, a sister he called "Little
   Big Sister," had also died suddenly after a short illness when he was
   ten.

Early career

   In 1936, Kurosawa learned of an apprenticeship program for directors
   through a major film studio, Nikkatsu. He was hired and worked as an
   assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto . After his directorial debut
   with Sanshiro Sugata, his next few films were made under the watchful
   eye of the wartime Japanese government and sometimes contained
   nationalistic themes. For instance, The Most Beautiful is a propaganda
   film about Japanese women working in a military optics factory. Judo
   Saga 2 has been held to be explicitly anti-American in the way that it
   portrays Japanese judo as superior to western (American) boxing.

   His first post-war film No Regrets for Our Youth, by contrast, is
   critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a
   left-wing dissident arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made
   several more films dealing with contemporary Japan, most notably
   Drunken Angel and Stray Dog. However, it was a period film – Rashomon–
   that made him internationally famous and won the Golden Lion at the
   Venice Film Festival.

Directorial approach

   Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed
   by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look. He liked using
   telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and also because
   he believed that placing cameras farther away from his actors produced
   better performances. He also liked using multiple cameras, which
   allowed him to shoot an action from different angles. Another Kurosawa
   trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood: for example
   the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon, and the final battle
   in Seven Samurai and the fog in Throne of Blood. Kurosawa also liked
   using frame wipes, sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the
   frame, as a transition device.

   He was known as "Tenno", literally "Emperor", for his dictatorial
   directing style. He was a perfectionist who spent enormous amounts of
   time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he
   dyed the rain water black with calligraphy ink in order to achieve the
   effect of heavy rain, and ended up using up the entire local water
   supply of the location area in creating the rainstorm. In Throne of
   Blood, in the final scene in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa
   used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing
   within centimetres of Mifune's body. In Ran, an entire castle set was
   constructed on the slopes of Mt. Fuji only to be burned to the ground
   in a climactic scene.

   Other stories include demanding a stream be made to run in the opposite
   direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof
   of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's
   presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.

   His perfectionism also showed in his approach to costumes: he felt that
   giving an actor a brand new costume made the character look less than
   authentic. To resolve this, he often gave his cast their costumes weeks
   before shooting was to begin and required them to wear them on a daily
   basis and “bond with them.” In some cases, such as with Seven Samurai,
   where most of the cast portrayed poor farmers, the actors were told to
   make sure the costumes were allowed to gradually get worn down and
   tattered.

   Kurosawa did not believe that “finished” music went well with film.
   When choosing a musical piece to accompany his scenes, he usually had
   it stripped down to one element (e.g., trumpets only). Only towards the
   end of his films do we hear more finished pieces.

Influences

   A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic
   influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare's
   works: Ran is based on King Lear and Throne of Blood is based on
   Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep Well parallels Hamlet, but is not affirmed
   to be based on it. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian
   literary works, including The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths,
   a play by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was based on Leo Tolstoy's The Death of
   Ivan Ilyich. High and Low was based on King's Ransom by American crime
   writer Ed McBain, Yojimbo may have been based on Dashiell Hammett's Red
   Harvest and also borrows from American Westerns, and Stray Dog was
   inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. Story lines in Red
   Beard can be found in The Insulted and Humiliated by Dostoevsky. The
   American film director John Ford also had a large influence on his
   work.

   Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too
   Western", he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well,
   including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the jidaigeki (period drama)
   genre of Japanese cinema. Indeed, Throne of Blood can be considered a
   Noh drama on film.

His influence

   Kurosawa's films have had a major influence on world cinema and
   continue to inspire filmmakers, and others, around the globe.

   Seven Samurai was officially remade into the John Sturges western The
   Magnificent Seven and unofficially in such genres as comedy, Three
   Amigos, science-fiction, Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars, and
   animation in Pixar's A Bug's Life . It has inspired two Bollywood
   films, Ramesh Sippy's Sholay and Rajkumar Santoshi's China Gate, which
   feature similar plots. The story was also used as inspiration in
   numerous novels, among them Stephen King's 5th Dark Tower novel, Wolves
   of Calla.

   Rashomon was also remade by Martin Ritt in 1964's The Outrage. The
   Tamil films Andha Naal (1954) and Virumaandi (2004), starring Shivaji
   Ganesan and Kamal Hassan, respectively, employ a storytelling method
   similar to that Kurosawa uses in Rashomon.

   Yojimbo was the basis for the Sergio Leone western A Fistful of Dollars
   and the Bruce Willis prohibition-era Last Man Standing.

   The Hidden Fortress is an acknowledged influence on George Lucas's Star
   Wars films, in particular Episodes IV and VI and most notably in the
   characters of R2-D2 and C-3PO. Lucas also used a modified version of
   Kurosawa's "trademarked" wipe transition effect throughout the Star
   Wars saga.

   Rashomon not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world but entered
   the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives
   (see rashomon effect).

Collaboration

   During his most productive period, from the late 40s to the mid-60s,
   Kurosawa often worked with the same group of collaborators. Fumio
   Hayasaka composed music for seven of his films — notably Rashomon,
   Ikiru and Seven Samurai. Many of Kurosawa's scripts, including Throne
   of Blood, Seven Samurai and Ran were co-written with Hideo Oguni.
   Yoshiro Muraki was Kurosawa's production designer or art director for
   most of his films after Stray Dog in 1949, and Asakazu Naki was his
   cinematographer on 11 films including Ikiru, Seven Samurai and Ran.
   Kurosawa also liked working with the same group of actors, especially
   Takashi Shimura, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Toshiro Mifune. His collaboration
   with the latter, which began with 1948's Drunken Angel and ended with
   1965's Red Beard, is one of the most famous director-actor combinations
   in cinema history.

Later films

   Red Beard marked a turning point in Kurosawa's career in more ways than
   one. In addition to being his last film with Mifune, it was his last in
   black-and-white. It was also his last as a major director within the
   Japanese studio system making roughly a film a year. Kurosawa was
   signed to direct a Hollywood project, Tora! Tora! Tora!; but 20th
   Century Fox replaced him with Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku before
   it was completed. His next few films were a lot harder to finance and
   were made at intervals of five years. The first, Dodesukaden, about a
   group of poor people living around a rubbish dump, was not a success.

   After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films
   although arranging domestic financing was highly difficult despite his
   international reputation. Dersu Uzala, made in the Soviet Union and set
   in Siberia in the early 20th century, was the only Kurosawa film made
   outside Japan and not in Japanese. It is about the friendship of a
   Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter. It won the Oscar for Best
   Foreign Language Film. Kagemusha, financed with the help of the
   director's most famous admirers, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola,
   is the story of a man who is the body double of a medieval Japanese
   lord and takes over his identity after the lord's death. Ran was the
   director's version of King Lear, set in medieval Japan. It was by far
   the greatest project of Kurosawa's late career, and he spent a decade
   planning it and trying to obtain funding, which he was finally able to
   do with the help of the French producer Serge Silberman. The film was a
   phenomenal international success and is generally considered Kurosawa's
   last masterpiece.

   Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more
   personal than his earlier works. Dreams is a series of vignettes based
   on his own dreams. Rhapsody in August is about memories of the Nagasaki
   atom bomb and his final film, Madadayo, is about a retired teacher and
   his former students. Kurosawa died in Setagaya, Tokyo, at age 88.

   After the Rain (雨あがる, Ame Agaru) is a 1998 posthumous film directed by
   Kurosawa's closest collaborator, Takashi Koizumi, co-produced by
   Kurosawa Production (Hisao Kurosawa) and starring Tatsuda Nakadai and
   Shiro Mifune (son of Toshiro). Screenplay, script and dialogues are
   both written by Akira Kurosawa. The story is based on a short novel by
   Shugoro Yamamoto, Ame Agaru.

Trivia

     * Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge
       quantities of money on film sets providing an uneatably large
       quantity and quality of delicacies, especially meat, for the cast
       and crew.

     * On one occasion Kurosawa got to meet John Ford, a director commonly
       said to be the most influential to Kurosawa. And not knowing what
       to say Ford simply said, "You really like rain." Kurosawa responded
       "You've really been paying attention to my films"

     * Kurosawa considered Ran the best film he ever made.

Awards

     * 1951 – Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Rashomon
     * 1952 – Honorary Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for
       Rashomon
     * 1955 – Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Seven Samurai
     * 1975 – Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for Dersu Uzala
     * 1980 – Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for Kagemusha
     * 1982 – Career Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival
     * 1984 – Legion d'Honneur
     * 1990 – Honorary Academy Award
     * 2006 – 10th Iran Cinema Celebration, Special honour

Filmography

     * Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
     * The Most Beautiful (1944)
     * Sanshiro Sugata Part II aka Judo Saga 2 (1945)
     * The Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail (1945)
     * No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
     * One Wonderful Sunday (1946)
     * Drunken Angel (1948)
     * The Quiet Duel (1949)
     * Stray Dog (1949)
     * Scandal (1950)
     * Rashomon (1950)
     * The Idiot (1951)
     * Ikiru aka To Live (1952)
     * Seven Samurai (1954)
     * Record of a Living Being aka I Live in Fear (1955)
     * Throne of Blood aka Spider Web Castle (1957)
     * The Lower Depths (1957)
     * The Hidden Fortress (1958)
     * The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
     * Yojimbo aka The Bodyguard (1961)
     * Sanjuro (1962)
     * High and Low aka Heaven and Hell (1963)
     * Red Beard (1965)
     * Dodesukaden (1970)
     * Dersu Uzala (1975)
     * Kagemusha aka Shadow Warrior (1980)
     * Ran (1985)
     * Dreams aka Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)
     * Rhapsody in August (1991)
     * Madadayo aka Not Yet (1993)

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